I gave the ruby port a try. It still has a long way to go. It can handle about the level of formatting that markdown allows...then it pretty much drops off there. The design seems pretty sound, but there's still a lot of stuff to fill in.

I think that the jython approach is the way to go for getting a Maven plugin written. You'll likely get good support for that on the mailinglist anyway.

Sweet! I got it working from Java! And you're right, it's much, much faster. It executes only twice as slow as the native python script, roughly 15 seconds for the Java EE tutorial. I'll take it!

I'll try to cleanup the script and paste it here with instructions. It took me awhile to figure out that passing arguments to the script isn't possible with the JSR-233 impl atm, so I had to switch to the python API.

I am a little fuzzy on overall goal...is it to use AsciiDoc as a means of writing tutorials for the trailblazer initiative? Is there a project set up somewhere where I can see what has been written so far?

That's a good question, probably something that needs to be addressed in a dedicated thread (the process that is).

The goal of the trailblazer SIG, in general, is to produce solid examples and documentation to help developers make use of JBoss and OSS technology. My perception is that a major hurdle to writing documentation is wrestling with docbook. At least, I have yet to find someone who actually wakes up in the morning excited to write in that over-engineered schema. I certainly don't. (You spend more time writing markup than you spend writing the actual documentation).

We've seen already the impact that Markdown has had on the willingness of developers and community members to write documentation. That has been further supported by the broad participation in the Arquillian website content (namely blogs and tutorials).

However, both textile and markdown don't give us enough power to be able to meet the documentation team (and their tools) half way. AsciiDoc is the first syntax I've seen that can provide the best of both worlds.

Long story short, yes, I see AsciiDoc as being the syntax of choice for writing any documentation we create in the trailblazer SIG. With this Java processor I've hacked together, we can store the documentation in src/main/asciidoc and process it using Maven (eventually) just like DocBook files (or you can just render it whichever way you want during development).

But that's just one pipeline. Since AsciiDoc is remarkably portable and readable, we can easily reuse it in many other areas. We can paste it into a gist, paste it into a github wiki page, paste it into a blog entry, paste it on Google+, and so on. The knowledge is extremely portable...and that's something I think will help set the trailblazer SIG on a path to success.

So far, we don't have any of this setup in a project. The tutorials I've been working on have been standalone (call them warm-up exercises). I'm going to touch base with Pete and Marius and see if I can help them adopt this process, which we will of course document in the SIG's wiki.